I Was the Dot in Dot-Bombhttp://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/
en-us2006-02-09T15:46:27-08:00

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Marty wasn't any slouch herself in terms of her contribution to society.
Aside from what she was doing for a living, and her art career, she ran
something that was a cross between an art salon and a group home out of her
house. She had a circle of young friends who she mentored and guided, as well
as socializing and going clubbing with. This circle included some of her
large extended family, such as her nephew Jason Foren and cousin Melissa
Forrest, as well as friends such as Dakota Warren and miscellanous associates
of all of them.

While she had some wild times with her young friends and associates, there
were a few very hard and fast rules in Marty's home, number one of which was,
no drugs. She might play and party hard with her crowd, and play games that
were irreverent and occasionally obnoxious, but it was all clean and mostly
legal.

Despite playing and clubbing, at core Marty retained a serious relationship
with anyone who needed her in that capacity. The parents of her friends were
willing to let them come and hang out specifically because her place was safe.
Additionally, she took it on herself to try to assist her charges past the
lumps and bumps of growing up. In some cases, there was much more going on
than just the normal angst of adolescence, and Marty worked to assist with
that as well.

One of her messages was constant, with anyone who would listen: get a college
education. She repeated this message not just with her young charges, but
with all of her classroom aides at school, and she was proud of each and every
one who took college courses. She practically burst with pride over each of
her mentees who graduated college, whether young or not so young, such as her
former aide Lynn Smart.

Many of her companions modeled for her to draw and paint during this period
of her and their lives. Marty painted the bulk of her "Watching TV" series
around this time. Each portrait in this series depicted the model as they
watched a favorite movie or television show, and each portrait was executed
from start to finish in about two hours, give or take.

Marty also mentored her friend Dakota Warren, himself an aspiring artist and
craftsman. As a craftsman, Dakota specialized in tilework, and he and Marty
collaborated on several tile murals for her house. He supported himself
through such tilework, but he also competed for and won several public art
commissions. In many ways, Dakota is and was the son Marty never had.

Dakota was the person who introduced Marty to the Internet. He interested her
by showing her how other artists were using the Internet to show their work.
Inspired, she collaborated with her cousin Melissa in creating her own art
site, showing all of her work as well as some of her writing and providing a
resume of her professional life.

Back in the workplace, Marty was taking cognitive behavioral theory and
applying it to the problems of her emotionally distrubed elementary school
students with great effect. This was more than just a job - this was a true
mission, a true calling. The students that wind up in the ED classroom aren't
just unhappy or a little angry. Marty's students were accomplished arsonists,
molestors as well as molested, drug users and sometimes dealers, and other
sorts of criminals. Their destiny was to wind up in prison; then they met up
with Marty.

At core, what Marty did was to identify the weak spot in the traditional cycle
of violence. The cycle propagates itself by inculcating children while they
are helpless and weak. The first lesson that it teaches is that there is no
consequence for bad acts, that in fact there are no bad acts, no right or
wrong.

The first countervailing lesson a student learned from Marty is that there is
in fact a standard that they must abide by - obeying is right, and accompanied
by a good consequence, and disobeying is wrong, and there is a price. From
there, she could build in each student an inner voice helping discriminate
right from wrong. That each inner voice would sound like her was just a minor
side effect of the process.

]]>scott2006-01-10T15:57:43-08:00Page 10http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000011.html
Some people believe that in addition to the traditional forward and backward
directions in time that it is possible to go sideways. Forward, of course, is
what we do every day - every second, we travel one second forward in time.
Backward is what we do in memory and in story, but not, so far, in person.
Sideways, sideways, now, is what we do when we imagine a different outcome for
an event or a set of events, all of the universes of what-if? Some scientists
speculate that what-if isn't just a fancy, that each time there is an event
that can branch two or more ways, that two or more universes fork off and the
event comes out each way in each universe.

Science fiction writers like to come up with all kinds of interesting what-ifs
about historical events and then write big elaborate stories about them. What
if the South won the Civil War? What if Hitler won World War II? What if
the Stanley Steamers didn't blow up quite as much and the gasoline engine
never took off? And so on and so on.

What if Scott had met Marty in 1984, or 1985, or even 1986 or 1987?

The first question any writer needs to ask about their what-if is, is it even
plausible? How could the South have won the Civil War? What could Germany
have done differently to win WWII? Sometimes, maybe, the what-if isn't so
plausible, but then everything else about the story has to be ironclad. If
you want to write a story about what if aliens invade Earth in the middle of
World War II, you had darn well better know everything there is to know about
that era, and then some.

Is it plausible for Scott to have met Marty at college? In truth, it's not
only plausible, it was almost impossible for them not to have met. CSU
Stanislaus only had about 5,000 students in the mid-1980s. It wasn't even an
official University in 1984, when they both enrolled - it was CSCS, California
State College, Stanislaus, and it only got upgraded in 1985 or 1986.

Moreover, the biggest impediment to their meeting - Marty's college boyfriend
- socialized with one of Scott's Computer Science professors and the prof's
wife. It turns out they were all Grateful Dead fans and went to concerts
together.

Additionally, Scott and Marty both remember going to the Sacramento Railroad
Museum during college as part of a group. Marty remembers the person Scott
rode with - he was another member of the Grateful Dead fan circle of the time.
It's a virtual certainty that they were on that trip together.

Lastly, both Scott and Marty hung out at Mom's, the on-campus hangout joint,
on Fridays after classes. They probably sat there and looked at each other,
both too shy to break the ice, from the tables of their respective social
groups. They may have stood in the snack line together, bumping up against
each other's spaces and social inhibitions.

The next question, when designing the world of what-if, is what would happen,
and would it make a difference? If the South wins the Civil War, and makes
itself into a separate country, there are various possible consequences, such
as the United States and the Confederate States fighting on different sides in
World War I, that make still other things go differently. If, on the other
hand, what happens is that the South actually conquers the North, takes over
completely, and then the CSA goes on much as the USA would have historically,
there is a lot less story there because the what-if made no difference.

So, what if Scott and Marty had met in college? Would things have gone
differently? The answer is not just yes, it's heck yes. Even if all that
happened is that they dated for a couple of years and then split up, the
period of time in which they would have been involved with each other was the
same period of time in which both of them got into rather stinky
relationships. The barest minimum that would have happened is that they could
have saved each other those horrible painful years.

Much more likely is that they would have stuck together all the way through
Marty's college years. When Scott moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1980s,
he may very well have continued the relationship, albeit at a long distance.
When Marty graduated, she would have been open to moving to Silicon Valley
herself, and so they probably would have wound up there, together, getting
married and buying property together. When the Internet boom came along,
Scott would have been well-positioned to participate, and they probably would
have done very nicely indeed.

At the very far end of the spectrum is the story Scott made up for Marty in a
sentimental moment. In one universe, far away in sideways time, Scott and
Marty got together and became very successful and powerful. In fact, they
became so successful and powerful that they dedicated themselves to traveling
all over the multiverse, and everywhere they went that they found themselves,
they intervened in the flow of events so that their alter-egos of that
particular universe got together. And that's all they do - travel from
universe to universe, planting the seeds of new romances every which way.

]]>scott2006-01-11T15:34:51-08:00Page 11http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000012.html
Back in our reality, by 1996 Scott had landed at a small consulting shop,
Vixie Enterprises, working for someone who didn't know quite what to do with
his new employee. Vixie sent Scott here and there, including to Phoenix,
Arizona, to meet up with the Chief Technology Officer of an Internet backbone,
a firm called Genuity; the man was called Rodney Joffe.

After a couple of months of bouncing around, Vixie sent Scott to San Francisco
to do some management work for David Holub, President of Whole Earth Networks,
a small regional Internet Service Provider (ISP). David was directly managing
his systems administration team, and wanted someone to take it off his hands
so that he could focus more directly on managing the company. Scott started
out working in San Francisco three days a week. After a couple of months,
Vixie messaged Scott out of the blue that he needed to give notice to Whole
Earth and get himself out to Phoenix again the next week. It seems that he
was moderately displeased that Scott and David had renewed Scott's contracting
agreement without consulting Vixie, and he was showing his ire by being rude
and arbitrary in terminating it.

When Scott went into David's office to give notice, David asked him if he knew
of anyone who was available to take the position over full-time, and named a
salary range that was a notch above Scott's current pay, with the title of
Vice President of Engineering. After not very much consideration, Scott put
in for the position himself and quit Vixie Enterprises. The parting was not
entirely amicable, and Scott had to threaten legal action over some back pay,
making things even less pleasant.

Whole Earth looked like it would be a pleasant gig, and the title, pay and
responsibility represented to Scott exactly where he wanted to be at that
point in his career.

Scott had never really looked into the ownership of Whole Earth Networks. He
learned these things over time: David Holub had started an ISP originally
called "Hooked" (as in "Get Hooked on the Internet"). The firm was under-
capitalized, as most small ISPs are, and he sold control to an associate in
order to get money to expand. At somewhere around the same time, Bruce Katz
(pronounced "Cates"), whose father had started Rockport Shoes, decided that
the Internet would be an interesting place to play. He had sold the shoe
company to Nike and had a considerable amount of money to play with. He
bought a conferencing system, The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a
spin-off of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog), that was one of the oldest
and most prestigious conferencing systems of the pre-Internet era. Bruce then
bought Hooked and reorgnized the two companies into three. The Well was
stripped down to just the conferencing system. Development of The Well's
conferencing software was moved to a new company, Well Engaged. Lastly, the
portion of The Well's operation that provided access to the system was merged
with Hooked and the result was christened Whole Earth Networks (WENet).

About three weeks after Scott started with WENet, Bruce Katz' assistant
Claudia showed up one morning. David Holub was absent and Claudia had a
strange scary-looking fellow in tow. The new man was introduced as Kevin
Randolph, and the executives of Whole Earth were told that he was the new
President and CEO and that he had been hired to sell the company.

The firing of David Holub was immensely unpopular with the long-time staff,
especially with the systems administration group that reported to Scott. Some
of them went so far as to hang banners and pictures from their desks,
protesting the firing and demanding that David be brought back. It looked for
a while like the situation might get ugly, with a mass resignation, but with
time things calmed down and the company kept going under the new CEO.

]]>scott2006-01-12T15:40:00-08:00Page 12http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000013.html
While each person is different in details, the broad sketches of how people
normally progress from infancy to maturity are fairly clear. The stages are
well-known and well-documented. While each stage is important, some of the
earliest stages are the most critical.

When a child is two years of age, they haven't yet developed the sense of
self, what some writers call the "analog I." In the normal course of
development, the child begins to become aware that the parent is separate from
the child, and over time comes to a full understanding of what it means and
becomes reconciled to separateness. Kindergarten normally starts around the
time that this process reaches the point where the child can tolerate being
away from their parent for half a day.

During the course of this process, there is a point, normally around the age
of three, where the child is in full rebellion against the realization that
the parent is separate from them. This is completely typical and normally it
ends within a year or two.

Psychologists have a lot of names for the situation where this normal
maturational process has become derailed. The names reflect which stage went
awry, or what particular feature of the person, usually an adult by this
point, is dominant. The names are of different personality disorders, such as
Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and
Antisocial Personality Disorder. These names just differentiate among
situations in which the person under discussion has a blurring between self
and non-self and the degree to which the person acts on that blurriness.

Basically, what happens is that the child becomes stuck at this point, and
grows up into an adult whose basic personality is that of a three year old
child. They won't be retarded in the typical sense - they'll have language
and intellect appropriate to their chronological age - but their motivational
and belief system is that of a three-year-old. They will have the verbal
ability and experience of an adult and they will put it into the service of
fulfilling the needs of a child who wishes to be in a state of union with the
parental figure. When they enter into relationships, they aren't looking to
have a mutually supporting and nurturing relationship between two equal
partners who are facing the world together and finding joy in the alignment of
goals, objectives, skills and abilities. These people, these emotionally
stalled adults, are looking to recreate a specific situation in which they are
the child again and the partner is the parent, and the parent is in service to
the needs of the child. Not only is the parent figure in service, but the
partner/parent must not have needs of their own that go against the needs of
the child. If the partner has the nerve to have a need of his or her own, the
broken person flies into a rage, just as the toddler rages when he or she
realizes that the parent is a separate person. Each time the partner diverges
from the image the disordered person has, the disordered person relives the
experience of the three-year-old and behaves just as rationally.

Few normal adults would willingly seek to have a romantic or marital
relationship with a three year old. However, the people who have these sorts
of disorders have become skilled at getting their needs met, and at the age of
three, the moral sense has not developed, so they have no moral inhibition
against doing whatever they deem necessary. This is why what we call
antisocial personality disorder (or sociopathy) is frequently present along
with the other features of this disorder. Like most diagnoses, sociopathy
must rise to a certain level before being considered clinical, but even when
it's not at that level, it is almost always at the sub-clinical level.

When people have a good social support and family structure, the people around
them help them steer clear of individuals with disorders like the above.
There are times, though, where what happens is that the disordered person is
able to co-opt their target's friends or family, or drive away some or all of
the support structure. At other times, their target doesn't have much
structure - they've moved or otherwise pulled themselves out of their
structure, one or more family members die, or other events leave them
vulnerable. When these things happen, the disordered person may be able to
establish themselves in their target's life in such a fashion that, even
though the target may be fairly healthy, they become embedded in a sick
situation and find themselves being supported only in becoming emotionally
unwell.

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It would be interesting, on many levels, to see early 21st century brain
science techniques brought to bear on studying how people respond to art.
There have been some studies done - some people, it has been shown, mirror the
facial expression of the subject when they are looking at portraiture, and it
appears that they actually feel the emotion being depicted. New brain
structures, called mirror neurons, found around the start of the 21st century,
provide a mechanism for understanding how this process works. It is likely
that the mirror neurons are highly involved in responses to art.

One of the other things that we are learning about the brain is that it is
much more plastic, more malleable at a later age, than had previously been
believed. It was shown some years back that brain cells are constantly being
produced in the brains of monkeys. It is likely that this is also true in
humans - there is no reason to suppose that it is not so. It has also been
shown in humans that certain brain regions enlarge under heavy use. London
taxicab drivers have a much larger hippocampus than average adults, and it has
further been shown that the longer someone has been a cab driver, the bigger
their hippocampus is. The hippocampus is the area of the brain that is
involved in navigating, so the correlation is clear - the more exercise the
hippocampus gets, and the longer it goes on, the bigger it gets.

The mirror neurons are brain structures that are involved in understanding
motivation, extrapolating unseen action from seen action, and in identifying
and empathizing with other people. These special neurons actually stimulate
the rest of the brain so that, for example, someone watching a sport will have
their sensory and motor centers switching on and off just as if they were
actually participating. The effect is even stronger if the viewer is someone
who does sometimes participate in that particular sport. So, to go back to
our art example, when the person views the portrait, it is probably not that
they take on the expression and then have the emotion. Instead, what is most
likely going on is that their mirror neurons process the facial expression for
them and then stimulate their brain so that they have the emotion; they then
take on the same expression as the work.

It has long been believed that women and men have differing levels of empathy.
This is something that is also being confirmed by science. Researchers are
also beginning to probe the brains of people with "non-traditional" gender
identities - gays and lesbians to start, and hopefully soon they will also
study bisexuals and transgendered persons. What is likely is that humans fall
across the whole spectrum, but that there are strong correlations - clumping
effects, if you will - between gender identity and brain structure. One of
the areas that will likely be fruitful for research will be in the
relationship between mirror neurons in specific and gender and how this
impacts what we are now coming to understand are gender-correlated behaviors.

Getting back to art again, it is reasonable to suppose that responsiveness to
certain forms of art - art with high emotive content, for example - is going
to be correlated with empathy and emotional communication in general. At
least in someone's initial experience, their response to art is likely to be
dominated by their innate predisposition. Somebody who is highly emotive is
likely to be very responsive to the emotional communication. On the other
side of the coin, someone who falls into what some call the "systematizer"
camp likely lacks the brain structures to appreciate or respond to the emotive
content. Over the long term, though, because the brain continues to grow and
change in response to experiences throughout adulthood, it should be possible
to stimulate and direct growth and learning so that even the systematizer can
understand, enjoy and even feel the emotional content of a work of art.

This is not to say that this process is the least bit simple or easy. It will
take time and a lot of exposure. Still, there is hope. Unless the structures
are someday found by some scientist to just not exist or to be hopelessly
deformed, even the densest systematizer should be able to learn to love art as
much as they love the artist.

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Selling a company isn't quite like taking a bag of beans to market. Assuming
that both farmers are honest, one bean is pretty much like another. They'll
taste about the same, and your farts will smell about the same at the other
end of the process.

Companies come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and the one thing they have
in common is that if they're for sale, they are generally dysfunctional. As a
buyer, the trick is to spot what's wrong and determine whether you can live
with it.

Actually, the dysfunction tends to extend to all companies, for sale or not.
In a corporate transaction, you have broken Company A buying broken Company B,
and the people involved are all busy scoping out each other's brokenness.

Whole Earth had one primary problem: as companies go, it was poor. It had
revenue of around $5 million per year, which is pretty nice if you're one
person, but pretty iffy for 50. Being poor meant that Whole Earth didn't have
good toys, and it didn't have enough money to give people good pay, so they
were unhappy. Not having good toys meant that it was hard to provide good
service to the customers, so they became unhappy and went away, which meant
that less money would come in.

Now, when you come into a company and you want to make it healthier
financially, you need to look at two things: how much money comes in, and how
much money goes out. A lot of people go for the quick fix - they cut down the
money going out - it's called cutting costs, and it usually involves firing
people. The idea with cutting costs is that there's a lag time between when
you cut the costs and when those cut costs come home to roost. Usually what
happens is that the cost-cutter doesn't just cut out fat - they also cut
muscle, and weaken the company. Anyhow, you try to sell the company during
that lag.

The other way of fixing the company is harder - you try to boost the money
that is coming in. Usually you need some money in order to make that happen -
it's called investing. You take this money, you fix up some stuff, maybe you
hire some people, and if you've done it right, revenues go up not just enough
to pay the money back, but some beyond that.

Kevin Randolph had an expression about cutting costs: "You can't save your
way to success." The course he took with Whole Earth was the harder and more
ethical one. He got honest money where he could, and he moved Whole Earth
from just treading water to where it could actually begin to have some forward
motion. He took Scott under his wing and mentored him in management, and he
got Scott to implement improved services. In some cases costs actually were
cut, but by and large what happened is that Whole Earth actually got some new
toys and various real problems were fixed.

One of Kevin's other mantras was "Fewer, better people." He and Scott had a
few go-rounds over this particular mantra, but once they got all of that
sorted out, Scott came to understand that instead of having 12 people on his
team, several of whom were distinctly mediocre, he could have 8 people, all of
whom quite good. Furthermore, Scott could pay those 8 good people much better
than 12 people had been paid, and this made both him and his people happy.

One of the surprisingly simply things that Kevin taught Scott was about
providing treats to his people as a way of building the team. It is amazing
what a little food and a few toys will do for morale and group-feeling. Pizza
is the traditional food, of course, though donuts were thrown in occasionally,
given Scott's fondness for the sugary food-like stuff. Scott also went to
Toys-R-Us one day and put about $200 of Nerf guns into his team's hands. This
was especially fun given that Kevin sat in a glass-walled office. It wasn't
unusual to come into Whole Earth and see a salvo of Nerf darts, with their
suction-cup tips, stuck to Kevin's office wall. Kevin's response to this was
distinctly tolerant: "Tell your people to not do that when I have guests."

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Part of that was already taken care of. As a San Francisco-area high-tech
firm, Whole Earth Networks had offered stock options to its employees. The
stock wasn't publically traded, so the options were basically worthless.
However, if management wants to incent employees to stay until a sale is
complete, it can offer an "accelerator" on options. Normally, stock options
vest over 3-5 years, meaning that each month, some more of your stock option
becomes available for you to buy. Since stock in a company that isn't traded
on a public exchange isn't worth anything, most people don't buy their vested
options, though, so even though they could own the stock, they don't.

With an accelerator in place, what happens is that on a sale, your option
vests 100% and you can buy it on the spot. Since selling the company usually
means selling all of the stock in the company, the buyer agrees that they will
buy the employees' stock as well as the owners', so the employees get to
"flip" their option immediately - buying it from the old owner and selling it
to the new one. The employees then pocket the difference between their option
price and the sale price.

This sort of accelerator acts as a strong incentive for employees to stay on
until the sale, because if you are not employed as of the official closing
date, you don't get to participate. However, this doesn't do anything to get
people to stay around after the date of the sale. Even in the best of cases
in any sort of buyout, things get shaken up and people become afraid for their
jobs, so Kevin offered a second level of incentive to key employees. The key
staff of Whole Earth was given an employment contract that said that for six
months after a sale, if they were laid off or they had a substantial reduction
in their responsibilities (an "effective termination," where they had their
job duties taken away but they weren't actually fired), they would get a
severance package of six months' pay.

By addressing these various issues, Kevin had taken Whole Earth from, frankly,
a pig in a poke, to being a saleable property. It was still substantially a 5
million dollar per year regional ISP, but at least it was healthy instead of
sickly, and it had something that looked like a potential future.

These cleanup activities had been taking place in parallel with the search for
a buyer. There were any number of inquiries, but the company that finally
took the bait was GST Telecom of Vancouver, Washington.

Excerpted from http://www.satanic.org/gst/
Real Press on the GST Buyout of Whole Earth Networks
There's been rumours that GST is buying WENET, the Bay Area ISP which is made
up of Hooked Inc. and the WELL's Internet branch.
Well, they're true. They're gonna fuck over some other poor bastards, just
like we were. Read all about it.
Eric reports: word from the inside is that things are already getting fucked
beyond belief. The recent loss of key technical people signals the beginning
of yet another exodus away from a once great community ISP. One short-terming
staffer's suggestion for naked Twister at the "team-building company picnic"
was met with censure and disapproval. In another painfully ironic twist, the
"internal communications director" of the tech staff sends out all email in
Microsoft Word attachments... which no one on the technical staff can read in
their UNIX mail clients. More to come... [6/19/98]
Good luck to all the WENET employees and customers. Satan knows, you're gonna
need it.

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Will WorldCom own the backbone business?
By Janet Kornblum
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: September 11, 1997, 7:40 PM PDT
The WorldCom deal could be the first of more to come, worried Scott Hazen
Mueller, vice president of engineering for Whole Earth Networks, which had
been involved in a dispute with UUNet earlier this year over interconnection
fees.
Other backbone providers could see the growth of UUNet, known as a hardball
competitor, as a threat. In turn, they also may start consolidating, joining
forces, and further decreasing the total pool of players.
"Like a lot of people in the industry, I read all these folks talking about a
big consolidation," Mueller said. "I think this is part of the first wave of
this. If your competition gets bigger, you feel like you need to find some way
to get bigger as well."
He had a word of caution, however: "Obviously, it's hard to predict the
future. But when you have few players, you have more opportunities for
oligopolistic behavior."
One of the reasons that David Holub had gotten fired from Whole Earth Networks
is that he had pushed the company into a confrontation with UUNet, one of the
biggest corporations in the Internet business, and something that had only
become bigger in the first wave of mergers and acquisitions.

UUNet had been founded in the 1980s by Rick Adams, sponsored by Usenix, the
UNIX Users' Association. In the 1980s, the Internet was a closed network, and
a parallel network, the UUCP Network, had been built up among sites that were
too small, too poor or in the wrong category to be able to get onto the
Internet. UUCP worked by having the participating computers dial each other
up on the phone and exchange e-mail files in an individual two-way swap.
Along with this e-mail system, there was a global bulletin-board system called
Usenet that shared many of the same underlying mechanisms.

When Scott was in college, he played around with e-mail, but the e-mail
systems he was familiar with were just a way to exchange messages with other
people on the same computer. Back in those days, PCs were still pretty
expensive, and usually people at a University shared one or two largish
computers by using so-called "dumb" terminals to connect to them. You sat at
your terminal, doing your work or playing Rogue or Hack, and when you got
bored you typed "mail" and the system would show you any e-mail you had gotten
from a friend sitting at another terminal, or earlier in the day or whatever.

In 1986, after Scott graduated college, he had dialed back into CSU
Stanislaus' main UNIX system to check his mail and see if anyone was around.
He had noticed, on and off in the past, people running some program called
'rn', and after finding no e-mail, he decided to try typing in 'rn' and see
what ensued. With two characters and a carriage return, his world was totally
transformed. 'Rn' stood for 'read news', and it was, at the time, the most
sophisticated program that existed for reading Usenet, the aforementioned
global bulletin board system. All of the sudden, Scott found that he could
read postings on hundreds of subjects, from thousands of people all around the
world. Moreoever, he could post and converse with them, and as a consequence
of the way Usenet was integrated with UUCP and e-mail, he could also send
private e-mail messages to anyone not just on the UUCP network, but on the
Internet as well as other networks like BITNET, a University network based off
of IBM mainframe machines.

Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!csustan!smdev
From: smdev@csustan.UUCP (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Newsgroups: net.micro.att
Subject: PC6300+ question
Message-ID: <138@csustan.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Aug-86 19:01:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: csustan.138
Posted: Thu Aug 21 19:01:05 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Aug-86 06:32:58 EDT
Reply-To: smdev@csustan.UUCP (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Distribution: na
Organization: City of Turlock
Lines: 8
Keywords: 6300(+) Unix(tm) MsDos
We're running three 6300's at our installation (MsDos - yecch). I've heard
(real) rumors that these machines can be upgraded to 6300+'s. Has anyone
out there done so? Also, how much MsDos compatibility is retained? I run a
CAD system that does a lot of nasty screen hacks, and the main reason to
upgrade is for increased processing power for this application, but if I can't
just copy files around to do the port, there is no sense in spending bucks on
hardware, unix or no. Any solid info on the + will be much appreciated.
Tanks advance... \scott

By 1987, Scott was running his own UNIX system at home so that he could
participate in the UUCP and Usenet networks as a full peer. When he moved to
the San Francisco Bay Area later that year, he began to form active UUCP
connections to anyone who would talk with him. At the peak of his UUCP years,
he had connections with nearly 40 other sites, including the NASA Ames
Research Center. He also participated in a private Usenet network for the
brand of UNIX machine he was using, an AT&T 3B1 (aka the "UNIX PC"), and as
part of that activity had UUCP links with sites in Rhode Island and New
Jersey. He even briefly had a UUCP connection with a site in Namibia, Africa.

One of Scott's connections was with UUNet, which had made a business of
providing UUCP connectivity for a fee. It was pricey; even when Scott was
very careful in how much he used it, it ran $75/month, and he was a
modestly-paid support technician. Still, it was a prestige connection, and
for a while his e-mail address was 'scott@zorch.uu.net' because he was a
customer.

Rick Adams' UUNet had been a community-oriented corporation. As it had grown
bigger, and moved from the relatively limited UUCP networking space into the
burgeoning commercial Internet, it had lost that flavor. Eventually, UUNet
was acquired by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) and MFS was in turn acquired
by LDDS/Worldcom, back before Worldcom's chairman Bernard Ebbers was forced
out over accounting fraud. UUNet had built an Internet backbone and the
associated customer business on top of wires and fibers leased from various
phone companies, but despite the expenses of doing so had agreed that they
would exchange traffic for free with smaller ISPs if the smaller ISPs would
come to the meeting points and connect with them there. This practice was
called "peering" and many of the technicians who had built the Internet felt
that free peering was in the greater community good.

MFS had built some of the major peering points (MAE West and MAE East) and
they got a cut of the action when ISPs arrangede to connect into those
locations, so they were happy to continue the tradition of free peering.
Worldcom, once it acquired MFS (and hence, UUNet) didn't see things quite that
way. They had been a long-distance company, and what they saw was that free
peering competed with their long-distance carriage business, so they decided
that they were going to stop it, and their one of the targets of opportunity
was Whole Earth Networks.

Under its new CEO, WENet sorted out its differences with UUNet. This was very
important to WENet, because it had free peering with more than one much larger
ISP, and this grandfathered-in connectivity was one of the assets it felt it
had to offer in a sale.

PSINet to peer with small potatoes
By Courtney Macavinta
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: August 25, 1997, 5:40 PM PDT
UUNet's policy shift sent some small Net providers into a frenzy, with one of
them even threatening to sue over the change. UUNet eventually pacified most
of the protesters, including Whole Earth Networks and NetRail, both of which
cut confidential deals to continue peering with UUNet.
"I think what UUNet wanted to do was a good thing for UUNet. What PSINet is
doing is good for them, but it's good for a lot of other people too," said
Scott Hazen Mueller, vice president of engineering for Whole Earth Networks.
He said the free peering will help PSINet build out its reach, making it a
more desirable ISP.
"If we don't already have an agreement with PSINet, we'll look into it," he
added.

]]>scott2006-01-25T16:05:44-08:00Page 17http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000018.html
From: eric@the.satanic.org (El Sysadmin Invisible)
Subject: Re: A modest proposal
Date: 1998/05/23
Message-ID: <895913391.919447@the.satanic.org>
X-Deja-AN: 355794101
References: <m3g1i3qeks.fsf@windlord.Stanford.EDU> <slrn6m9mcu.70n.sw@eyrie.org> <rone.FriMay22090400PDT1998.25589@ennui.org>
X-Cache: nntpcache 2.3.2.1 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/)
Distribution: 4gh
Cache-Post-Path: the.satanic.org!e...@localhost.satanic.org
Organization: Satanic SysAdmins, Inc.
Newsgroups: net.subculture.usenet
stare master wrote:
] In article <slrn6m9mcu.70n...@eyrie.org>, sw <s...@eyrie.org> wrote:
] >Er, what's Zorch?
] Scott Hazen Mueller <zorch@uunet.uu.net> among others. Also a head
] honcho at wenet.net.
And a damn good barbeque chef.
--
Eric Sorenson - root at satanic dot org - http://satanic.org
Spamford got what he deserved. Is your system vulnerable?
Send me UCE and find out...
GST Telecom was what was known as a "fiber-based CLEC" in industry parlance.
A LEC was a Local Exchange Carrier, or a local telephone company. After the
judge broke up Ma Bell back in the 1980s, her offspring, the Baby Bells, were
formally known as Local Exchange Carriers. A CLEC was a Competitive Local
Exchange Carrier, a company that had set itself to compete with one or more
LECs for local telephone customers. A "fiber-based CLEC" was a CLEC that was
building its own infrastructure of optical fiber, usually on a city-by-city
basis. In the late 1990s, there were several companies putting fiber into
major (or minor) US cities - MFS, TCG, ICG and GST were working the big
cities, and Brooks Fiber was working the smaller ones.

One difference between GST and the other players in the fiber-based CLEC space
is that GST was also working on installing its own long-distance fiber runs.
Part of their game was to install extra fibers and then trade those fibers
with other companies so that they could increase the size of their network
without actually having to dig trenches and lay cable themselves. GST's goal
was to make itself into some sort of substantial phone company that serviced
customers in a regional basis.

As part of their strategy of building this multi-faceted business, GST went on
a bit of a buying spree and picked up ISPs in Hawaii and the Pacific
Northwest. In the late 1990s, ISPs and telephone companies (telcos) were
considered to have synergy - to be complementary - because the telcos owned
the wires and fibers and the ISPs put signals (phone calls and data
connections) onto those fibers. The idea was that the ISP would save money by
getting their connections from their parent telco at wholesale rates, and the
telco would save money by getting the ISP to be a guaranteed customer for
their wires and fibers. In this manner, the overall company would be able to
save its way to success, or some such.

There was one small problem with GST's strategy: they weren't any good at
actually executing it. The first glimmering of this problem surfaced, from
the viewpoint of the folks at WENet, prior to the actual acquisition. People
who had been on staff at GST's prior acquisitions in Hawaii and Oregon had
created a series of web pages, hosted at satanic.org (a Satanism spoof site),
detailing their history with GST and their beefs with corporate management.

In a modest example of what a small world the Internet was, satanic.org was
run by Eric Sorenson. Eric was the roommate of JD Falk, who was an associate
of Scott's in anti-spam activism and a member of the Provisional Board of
CAUCE, the anti-spam lobbying organization. As part of CAUCE's early campaign
to lobby the US Congress to pass a good anti-spam law, the Board drafted a
letter to Congress, printed 535 copies of the letter, 535 envelopes for all of
the Senators and Representatives, and held an envelope-stuffing party. The
party was held at JD's house; attendees included Scott, JD, Eric Sorenson,
Sean Eric Fagan and James Glave, at the time a writer for Wired News. As part
of the proceedings, Scott brought a passel of supplies from Costco and
barbequed up a lunch for the crew.

-----

Back in the 1950s, a radio comic named Red Blanchard coined the term "zorch,"
meaning "cool," approximately. Scott's dad was a teenager in that era, and
a friend of his tagged him with Zorch as a nickname. When Scott was a small
child, his dad must have thought having a son was pretty cool, because he
called his son Zorch.

When Scott bought his first UNIX computer, his AT&T 3B1, he needed to have a
"node" name for it in order to be able to attach it to the UUCP network. He
decided that he really liked the name "zorch." When his dad objected, wanting
zorch to be reserved for Scott's first son, Scott stated that he wasn't going
to have kids and that he'd use the name for his computer.

It took Scott a lot of years to appreciate how that must have hurt his father.

Having named his UNIX computer "zorch", when Scott was a UUNet customer, his
customer account name and signon into UUNet's machine was the name of his UNIX
computer - zorch, again. In the mid-1990s, after Scott stopped being an
actual customer of UUNet, he got a guest account on one of their systems to
use for performing the public service of moderating some Usenet newsgroups.
When the UUNet staffer told him to pick an account name that wouldn't be in
conflict with one of their customers, he picked zorch as his account name.

After that, when Scott set up a computer account, if he couldn't get his first
choice ("scott"), he chose "zorch" as his account name. When he arrived at
Whole Earth, the account name "scott" belonged to one of his staff, so he took
his second choice. Thereafter, he was known as Zorch to the people who worked
for him.]]>

scott2006-01-26T16:00:00-08:00Page 18http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000019.html
Now, things didn't go quite as smoothly as they should have for Scott after
his effective termination. GST disputed that they had taken any action and
tried to claim that Scott had voluntarily quit his job. It took some six
months of rattling his lawyer at GST to get them to see the sweet light of
reason, and all things considered, it probably cost them more money in fees to
their attorney, on top of the actual settlement, than it would have cost had
they just paid the severance off in the first place. In addition, Scott's
take-home was the same as it would have been because the tax treatment of a
settlement payment differs from that for salary, so it was hardly a lose:lose
situation.

Scott did retain a customer relationship with GST Whole Earth Networks, as the
San Francisco company was known post-merger, for a couple of years. He had
what had been a high-speed connection at the time, a dedicated 56Kbit leased
line, running into WENet headquarter as one of his perqs of working there, and
he retained it at his own personal expense afterward. From a distance, he saw
as Whole Earth's bread-and-butter dialup business was sold off to another
company, and eventually he and his leased line were sold to Time Warner
Telecom.

Now, due largely do his first wife, Scott's financial situation in mid-1998
was none too good. Even though he had been making a decent salary as a vice
president at WENet, and had made a couple of month's pay on the sale of the
company, he wasn't in a position to take an extended leave. Instead, he took
a short vacation, and spent time on his cellphone while nominally camping
making calls to two potential employers.

The first opportunity he was evaluating was a second stint with Kevin
Randolph. GST had bought Whole Earth but hadn't been interested in keeping
Kevin on board, so he had gone to Hong Kong and was working for a company
owned in part by Softbank Japan. Softbank Japan was an affiliate of Softbank
US, which was the primary venture capital company behind Yahoo. The company
Kevin was working with, actually a small clump of related companies, included
something called Asia Communications Global Limited (ACGL) and it's child
operating company, the grandiosely-named Asia Online (AONL). AONL was an ISP
based in Hong Kong, roughly the size of Whole Earth Networks. Softbank wanted
to figure out whether to shut it down, sell it, or build it into something
bigger, and it had engaged Kevin to help it figure that out.

During the 1980s and 1990s, when Scott was active in the UUCP network world,
he made the acquaintanceship of one Dave L. Rand. Dave had gone on, in the
commercial Internet world, to help found and run, as the CTO, an Internet
company called Abovenet. Abovenet had started with the idea of being the
network "above" the Internet (hence the name), but had over time focussed more
on the new market of creating Internet collocation centers - facilities where
average companies could bring their computers and have guaranteed power, air
conditioning, Internet connectivity and other services needed to build 24x7
platforms for new applications such as e-commerce. On top of that, Abovenet
was laying or acquiring its own fiber runs and so building an even bigger
business that way.

Now, at the end of 1992, Scott had made what turned out to be a strategic
mistake for his career. He let his first wife's whining and crying convince
him to buy a house out in the sticks, in Salida, California, best described as
a suburb in Modesto. Modesto, as the reader may recall, was the hick town
featured by George Lucas in "American Graffiti" and the place he got his
behind out of as soon as he could.

The reason that this was a strategic mistake is that it wasn't really very
tenable for him to commute from Salida to Silicon Valley or San Francisco.
The commute ranged from 3 to 4.5 hours daily, depending on the exact location
of the employer, and the physical and emotional toll was no longer
sustainable. Scott had started, around 1995, to look for some way out of the
situation.

So, in 1998 as he was evaluating the two employers, location weighed very
heavily in his mind. He seemed to be having ongoing miscommunications with
Dave Rand over the Abovenet position, and he had worked with Kevin for over a
year at that point and got on with him fairly well. The clincher for him,
though, was that Abovenet was in San Jose, and would require him to commute
daily through the most-congested traffic corridor anywhere in the United
States - I-680 southbound between Pleasanton and Fremont. The Asia Online job
would be based in Hong Kong, but after 5+ years on the road, that didn't seem
like such a bad thing.

As a result, in July 1998, Scott started with Asia Online as part of Kevin's
team of consultants.
]]>

scott2006-01-27T15:54:33-08:00Page 19http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000020.html
Why is it a trick? Well, think about it. If a kid likes to draw, chances are
pretty good that when they grow up, they can become and artist or architect or
drafter - some occupation that uses that inclination. If the kid likes to
sort pencils, there's all kinds of office work their suited for. If they are
a nerd that likes to fiddle with wires and electricity, they can become an
electrical/electronic engineer, a computer person, a power-systems expert, or
some other highly-skilled (and well-paying field).

What happens to all of those jocks when they grow up? Take a look around -
how many slots are open for professional athletes, as a percentage of the
population? How many kids are directed into athletic pursuits in secondary
school, as a percentage? The numbers are kind of out of whack, aren't they?

Now, we're pretty open about this when we talk about minorities, and how they
are deceived about sports as being a route out of the ghetto, but what about
the bigger picture? How many people, in general, think that being a sports
star in high school is somehow real and important? Yet a few short years
later, they have a major collision with reality, and the next thing they know,
they're selling life insurance, or used cars, or maybe they got a phys ed
degree and a teaching credential, thinking they could teach gym or be a coach,
and now they're stuck teaching math and science to the underachievers in
junior high, because there's a big mismatch between the need for jocks in the
real world and the supply of them our school systems are producing.

Yet we continue to worship the jocks and beat up the geeks. No wonder the
countries of the world where that isn't true, where they have no such streak
of anti-elitism, are eating our collective lunch. Japan may not be the club
to beat America over the head with, but look at outsourcing to India and to
China. Look at how many engineers and scientists are being graduated from
schools in those countries, and realize that our educational system can't even
master teaching basic literacy to our immigrant population.

When smart people grow up, they go in one of two major directions when it
comes to how they relate to other smart people. If they have bought into the
mythos that the jocks and the pretty people are the "best," and have bought
into the ethos of anti-elitism, they are filled with loathing for themselves
and for other smart, nerdy people. These sorts of people are insecure,
territorial, and heavily invested in trying to show off to the cliques they
weren't able to crack in secondary school. They are frequently vicious, and
in general they just aren't that good. They and the jocks and cheerleaders
can infest an organization, but they aren't as important as they think they
are. They don't create new things, they don't do important work, as they are
trying hard to hold onto the status quo.

If a kid has been told, when growing up, that they're OK as they are, no
matter what those other people think of them, when they do grow up, they come
to realize that the world outside of school has flipped around. What seemed
important in school no longer is, and the people who were (self-)important
then are nobodies now. That kid, grown up, likes to associate with other
smart and nerdy people, the smarter the better. These are the people who head
to places like Silicon Valley, not simply because they want the opportunities
that are there, but because they want to associate with a lot of other people
like them.

A long time ago, it actually was important to be faster and stronger than the
other guy, because you were physically competing directly for the same source
of food. That's a long, long time in the past, and those skills are no longer
relevant in today's world. In the sort of heavily specialized society we have
today, where the important competition is among ideas, the person who is best
suited at working with ideas is the most successful.
]]>

scott2006-01-30T15:38:55-08:00Page 20http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000021.html
Now, HKIA at CLK (or just CLK, for short) is a big airport. It may not be the
biggest in the world, but it's big enough to be extremely confusing to a
sleep-deprived newbie making his first international flight. Kevin had
briefed Scott that there was a train connecting the airport to the actual
city, and they planned that Kevin would meet Scott at the airport, but they
both knew that the exigencies of business might disrupt that plan.

So, on arriving at CLK, the normal process is that you stumble off the plane
in a stupor (the stupor is a requirement on all flights over more than six
time zones or more than 12 hours in duration) and follow the herd through the
lower-level hallway. CLK is laid out on two levels, you see - the upper
level, with the vaulted ceilings, huge windows and award-winning architecture
is for departures. The lower level, with standard-height ceilings and much
smaller windows is for arrivals. You trundle along, with your carry-ons until
you reach an escalator, and following the crowd, you descend to a platform.
The next thing you know, you are on a train, standing-room-only, of course,
and you're wondering what happened to immigration and customers, baggage
claim, and all of the other niceties and why you are already on the train to
the city.

The stupor is very important, you see. It keeps you from realizing, on that
crucial first trip, that you can't possibly already be on the train to the
city, but it also keeps the panic from escalating very far before the train
arrives at the main platform and you step back off. From here, if you've done
the least bit of traveling, things begin to make a little more sense. You
collect your bag from the enormous carousel and take it over to be inspected,
though you more usually get to be waved through. It's then onward to the
immigration line. After you pass customs, you loop around a dividing wall and
come up to the rope line separating the secure part of the airport from the
public section. That's where Kevin was waiting for Scott, and it was one of
the happiest sights Scott had seen in quite some time.

Geographically, Hong Kong is divided, like Gaul, into three parts.
Originally, the British pried Hong Kong Island from the Chinese. It was on a
"lease" for 99 years in perpetuity, meaning that the lease automatically
renewed for as long as Britain had bigger guns than China.

Some while afterwards, the British realized that HK Island wasn't very viable.
They then extracted two more bits of land from the Chinese - first, the land
opposite the island on the mainland, which is Kowloon; and secondly, a grab
bag of islands and bits of the mainland that came to be known collectively as
the New Territories, or NT. The NT was Britain's final attempt to make HK
self-sufficient in terms of things like food and water. By the 1980s, there
was a problem. It wasn't so much that the Chinese had much bigger guns than
they had 100+ years before, though they did. It wasn't that the British had a
case of collective remorse over colonialism, though they may have. It was
more a practical matter. It seems that the NT wasn't on an automatically
renewing lease, and the Chinese were being stubborn about renewal. They were
willing to let the lease on HK Island and Kowloon renew - at least, they said
they were - but they weren't about to let Britain renew the lease on the New
Territories. Furthermore, Hong Kong as a total entity was already dependent
on the Chinese mainland for water and power; without the New Territories, the
remaining areas, which contained something like 20% of the land and 85% of the
population, would be totally unsupportable.

Ultimately, of course, what happened is that China and Britain negotiated the
return of Hong Kong to Chinese control, with HK becoming a "Special
Administrative Region" or SAR - "one country, two systems." In practical
terms, for an American expatriate in the late 20th century, it meant
relatively little. The uniformed Chinese people with machine guns worked for
the People's Republic of China instead of Great Britain, but they still had
machine guns, and at that point, who paid them made relatively little
difference.

The geography of Hong Kong meant somewhat more than the politics. Hong Kong
is both a territory - the SAR - and a city, with the city located on the north
shore of Hong Kong Island and the south shore of Kowloon peninsula. If you
meet someone from Hong Kong, the usual question is, "Hong Kong side or Kowloon
side?"

Chek Lap Kok was a small island off of Lantau Island, in the western part of
the New Territories. CLK Island was extended with landfill and the airport
was built on top of it. A new freeway and rail line was built along Lantau
Island to connect the airport to Hong Kong Island. The rail line, the Airport
Express, also had a semi-local spur route that branched off to a "New Town"
that was built near the airport to house the airport's workers.

What all of this meant is that CLK was very well-connected with Hong Kong
proper, despite being out in the sticks. Your travel options included the
Airport Express, which was a very nice train, as well as several options via
road, such as taxi, private car, or any number of airport buses.
]]>

scott2006-02-01T14:55:48-08:00Page 21http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000022.html
Scott's first real memory of Hong Kong proper, then, is of the street just
outside of Fortress Hill MTR, near the border between Causeway Bay and North
Point. It was hot, humid, dark out but brightly lit and noisy, and the
traffic lights made the most unearthly rattling sound. In all, it was a
little bit of hell.

Where Scott and Kevin stayed during those first months at Asia Online was at
the Newton Hotel. The Newton was quite reasonable by Hong Kong standards and
very convenient to the Asia Online office, just 5 to 10 minutes on foot,
depending on just how hot and sweaty you wanted to get.

The price for staying at the Newton was that the rooms, with a little glue,
would have served quite nicely as postage stamps. They all came in the same
size (ultra-small), with a choice of one bed or two, and they faced either
right or left. As a Californian, Scott was quite grateful that they had a
non-smoking floor, as tobacco was quite popular in HK at the time.

Anyhow, the room was slightly larger than the double bed on two sides - just
enough to sidle around it. The third side featured a built-in desk with a
cube refrigerator (full of the usual honor-bar crud) and a 13-inch television.
The TV had one or two english-language channels, a bunch of Chinese channels,
and some other miscellaneous bits. You could also "preview" the soft-core
down about the same way as the regular channels.

There wasn't anything resembling a dresser or chest of drawers. In the
closet, which was about the size of a small guest closet in an older American
home, there was one drawer below the hanging area, and one shelf above the
hangar rod. You also had a little floor space for your shoes. Lastly, the
window was a bit of a bay window and there was a good-sized shelf there, which
made a decent space for storing suitcases.

The bathroom was likewise compact, though not outrageously so. Hong Kong
people are fond of "on demand" water heaters, so after a hot shower you would
find that the mirror was strangely free of steam and quite warm to the touch.
Presumably, the on-demand heater was behind the mirror.

The view from the Newton is singularly uninspiring - a small slice of Victoria
Bay and Kowloon. One of the things about Hong Kong is that all of the
exciting architecture that you see in media is in fact there, and it's all on
the Hong Kong side. If you're on the Hong Kong side, what you see is Kowloon,
which is heavily residential and hence largely socialist worker housing. If
you want to enjoy looking at something like I. M. Pei's famous Bank of China
building, you really want to live in Kowloon, looking back at HK Island.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Pei's BoC building looks like a giant
knife, slicing back into the hills overlooking the bay. Specifically, the
knife is slicing at the British Governor General's mansion...a bit of feng
shui that the locals rather delight in, quite understandably.
]]>

scott2006-02-03T16:04:54-08:00Page 22http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000023.html
Scott and Kevin occupied side-by-side offices on the side of the building
overlooking the park and marina. The marina was quite a peculiar sight, as it
was roughly rectangular with a diagonal aisle. On one side of the aisle were
the western-style boats, which were uniformly white. On the other side of the
aisle were the Chinese junks, which were the brown of the woods used in their
construction. From above, the segregation by color was quite striking.

Hong Kong SAR is about 85% parkland, so to say that Victoria Park was HK's
largest park would be a misnomer. Still it is a good-sized urban park and
makes a significant break in the cityscape. That open space also gives the
occupants of Citicorp Centre a good view.

The assignment Kevin had taken and that Scott was now part of was to look AONL
over, determine if it could be fixed up, what was needed, and if the owners
approved, actually do the fixing. Despite the name, what Asia Online was in
fact was just a mid-sized local Hong Kong Internet Service Provider. They
sold the usual menu of services (dial-up, leased line and hosting) to the
usual sorts of customers, individuals and small businesses for the most part.
They had somewhere around 18,000 dialup customers, perhaps a hundred or so
leased-line customers (much higher speed and much higher revenue, the cream of
the customer crop) and a relatively small hosting facility up there in their
expensive real estate. As a small capper, in order to reduce the load on the
air chillers in their data center and to control the electric bills, they had
put tinfoil up over the windows in that part of the building. This wasn't
exactly unreasonable, since it did get pretty warm in the sunny spots, but it
was a bit tacky.

The first order of business for Scott was simply to get oriented. Hong Kong
is eight or nine time zones away from the US, depending on the time of year,
and it takes about a week just to adjust to the time change. In addition,
there was a whole new city-state to explore. As an example, after Scott
arrived in Hong Kong, he was so disoriented in his sense of place that he had
his directions reversed and though he needed to turn left at the main road to
head toward Central, when in fact he needed to turn right. Exploring his
surrounds on the weekends, it took him two to three weeks to sort just this
small item out. Eventually, combining riding the rails with walking, he
walked the entire distance from Central to North Point. Given the HK summer
weather, though, he only walked the distance from one station to the next on
each weekend day that he went out on this trek.

Orienting himself with Asia Online was no less time-consuming. Most of the HK
Chinese staff that Scott worked with had perfectly serviceable English.
However, they have a sort of cultural shyness, especially the technical staff,
and especially about their language, so they were painfully uncomfortable with
the sort of casual converstation that California's high-technology business is
built on. Ultimately, Scott's habit of using e-mail for even trivial matters
came to his rescue, as the staff let him know that with e-mail, they could
read and re-read his requests until they understood them.

Initially, Scott's ambit was simply as a consultant to Kevin, but after a few
weeks it became time to start to change things up. As the first step, three
formerly separate technical groups - the team that ran the systems and
networks, the technical support organization, and the internal MIS group -
were merged together into a Technology department. Scott was then announced
to the merged group as their interim vice president. This gave Scott a team
of some 15 or so people, including three subordinate managers.
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scott2006-02-06T15:54:21-08:00Page 23http://blog.zornix.com/iwasthedot/archives/000024.html
Now, any technical team that is worth its salt knows what the problems in
their infrastructure are, and will have plans to take care of them. Where
things break down at an ISP are either that the tech team isn't good, or the
management doesn't listen to them, or there isn't money. It wasn't true which
of the latter two was the case at AONL when Scott arrived, but the tech team
had changes they wanted to make, and the first thing Scott did was just to
facilitate having those happen.

One of the biggest problems to be resolved in the first two months was with
Asia Online's backbone network. The backbone of an ISP is composed of the
connections to bigger ("upstream") ISPs, and the size of the ISP's backbone,
and the degree of fullness, is what will define the experience the users of
that ISP have when they access external resources on the Internet.

Part of what should be happening in a well-run network is that the staff has
some way to monitor what is going on in the network. Usually, because ISPs
are relatively poor, this is done with the free tool MRTG, written in part by
Scott's acquaintance Dave Rand. MRTG, for Multi-Router Traffic Grapher, is a
system that probes the switches and routers that direct traffic within an
ISP's backbone; it then stores the data and provides a set of web pages with
graphs of the data. In short, MRTG enables you to look at the total volume of
traffic going over any given part of your network.

Asia Online was in fact using MRTG, and they had graphs of what was going on.
What took a long while to sort out, possibly because of language differences,
and possibly in part due to differing cultural assumptions, was that even
though it didn't look that way on the MRTG graphs, the traffic was hitting an
arbitrary limit at 50% of the stated capacity of the backbone. It turned out
that the backbone connection in question was only guaranteed up to the 50%
level, and anything above that was catch-as-catch-can - not guaranteed at all.
Once the facts were established that support that, it became obvious that the
traffic level had a "haircut" at the 50% level, such that the graph ramped up
in the morning, then went flat at 50% all day long, and finally dropped back
down around midnight.

One of the additional minor bits of information that Scott discerned from
looking at these MRTG graphs was that Hong Kong was a late night city compared
to San Francisco. The evening peak at Asia Online started later and ended
later than it had at Whole Earth Networks, with significant traffic going on
until around 2AM. This was something that was evident as well in walking
around Hong Kong on a Sunday morning - if you went out early to avoid the
heat, nothing was open. The restaurants might be open for breakfast, but the
various small shops largely didn't open until between 11AM and noon.

The reason that all of this technical fiddling around was important to Asia
Online - important enough to import Scott all of the way from California to
deal with it - was expressed succinctly in another of Kevin Randolph's adages:
"You can't fill a bucket if the water leaks out the bottom as fast as you pour
it in the top." Having a network that was filling up in the morning meant
that from that point until the evening, everybody had trouble getting out on
the Internet. They had slow performance, they became unhappy, and eventually
they stopped being customers of Asia Online. It didn't matter how hard the
company might work on marketing itself - Kevin's forte - or how quickly they
acquired new customers, if they lost customers just as fast because the
service stank.

There were other technical tweaks that Scott oversaw and caused to happen - he
was assigned a modest $400k budget to ensure that the service improved, and he
spent the money and the service did in fact improve. There were other changes
that Kevin made to customer acquisition, but underneath it all, improving
customer retention helped move Asia Online from shrinking to growing.
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